PlayStation hackers have discovered a second way to use the
console to bypass the DVD industry's strict regime. The first hack
overcame the games machine's DVD regionalisation software, and now
users have found out how to circumvent its DVD copy protection
mechanism.

According to EE Times and reports from Register
readers, Japanese Web sites devoted to Sony's console reckon the
PlayStation's analog RGB output port can be used to copy a DVD onto
VHS. Essentially, the signal sent from the PlayStation is picked up
by a VCR's input socket and recorded as if it were an on-the-air
broadcast

Sandpile! Why haven't we been there for so long? The site, which
you can find at this unique resource locator (address) is here.
This isn't a news site, but it does have some very reliable
information on the IA-32 architecture. And if you need to get your
facts right for a piece you're doing on older CPUs, there's even a
museum section.

Missed this a day or two back but there's a guide to buying PC
hardware over at Sharky
Extreme. You can find a guide to buying retail parts at another
web site, PC
Stats.

Silicon
News, which we haven't visited before -- sorry about that -- has
a pricing comparison article between Pentium IIIs and Athloniums.

PlayStations and PCs? Those interested in PC emulation may care
to hightail it over to 3D
Unlimited, where there's a review of Bleem!

Troubled 3D graphics hardware developer 3dfx is to buy Gigapixel
in a stock swap that values its smaller rival at around $186
million.

The deal will see Gigapixel shareholders offered nearly 15.6
million 3dfx shares valued at around $40 apiece - rather more than
the $13 or so they're trading at these days.

Senior staffers at 3dfx said the acquisition was made for two
reasons: first, to accelerate the company's graphics chip roll-out
cycle, which has been knocked way out of kilter by the much
longer-than-expected development of the VSA-100, powerhouse of the
upcoming Voodoo 4 and 5 cards. At the same time, 3dfx wants to break
into the lower-end consumer electronics market: the set-top boxes
that so many players are pinning their hopes on, albeit without any
real evidence that there's a market for them.

Now Nvidia and Microsoft are the best of chums, thanks to X-Box,
the 3D graphics specialist's technology is beginning to appear in
DirectX, Microsoft's games-oriented API. The first contribution is
Nvidia's Volume Texture Compression (VTC) format, which doesn't
sound much but gives a very tasty hint about the direction Nvidia is
taking the X-Box's graphics engine.

The key word here is 'volume'. The latest generation of 3D
engines - with one exception, Mitsubishi's VolumePro chip - form
object models out of matrices of points. The network of points
define a surface over which a texture can be wrapped.

That's fine as it goes, and greater external detail can be added
by upping the number of points that define the model. The trouble
is, this approach provides no information about the space within the
model. Real objects, after all, tend to be solid - current 3D models
aren't.

Intel is now expected to roll out high-end Celeron processors
next week based on the Coppermine Pentium III core and including
Screaming Sindie, multimedia extensions.

We revealed the existence of these processors earlier on this
year.

But, like Celerons based on Pentium II technology, the cache on
the processors is expected to be halved, as Intel starts to position
the products against AMD Athlon offerings.

AMD is taking extremely aggressive price action in the second
quarter, according to sources close to the firm. But a
representative at the company said no price cuts were expected in
the near future.

The first Celerons to appear will be 600MHz and 566MHz units, and
other microprocessors based on the same technology are expected to
follow shortly in April. No pricing details are available as yet for
the parts to launch next week.

A US reseller has warned consumers to be on the lookout for
ersatz Athlons.

ComputerNerd
USA recently received a shipment of counterfeit AMD Athlons. It
said its suspicions were aroused after staff noticed that the
packaging on the chips appeared to have been tampered with.

The plastic cartridge back covers on the fakes were different to
the original AMD covers. They were made of a shinier plastic and all
the corners were rounded, whereas all angles should be straight with
straight intersecting edges.

As we reported earlier this year, Nvidia's NV15 chip is speeding
towards completion. The chip is likely to be called the GeForce 2
and will clock to between 180 and 200 MHz, according to reliable
sources.

And, as reported earlier, the chip will support between 32MB and
64MB of double data rate (DDR) memory, and may also be able to use
other memory types.

Creative Labs will be the first off the mark with a product, and
its likely name will be the 3D Blaster GeForce 2.

Boffins at Big Blue said at the end of last week that they have
devised a method that may, one day, produce data storage systems
with 100 times the capacity of today's drives.

The method uses a combination of nanotechnology and chemistry
which produces what the scientists describe as a "radically new
class of magnetic materials".

The chemical reactions IBM has identified cause minute magnetic
particles made up of only thousands of atoms to arrange themselves
into arrays, each particle separated from the other by the same
distance.

As expected, Intel is expected to announce the arrival of 866MHz
and 850MHz Coppermine Pentium IIIs, when the company opens its
portals at eight o'clock AM, Santa Clara time.

The company is also expected to announce the arrival of Xeon
versions of these microprocessors.

The prices of such parts, when they become available, are
expected to be very close to the figures we published last week, and
there will be no price adjustments to accompany the PR fanfare, we
understand.

Circuit City, the US giant computer retailer, has issued an email
memo to staff, announcing that orders for multiple units of the
I-Opener Net appliance would be cancelled, due to "increased
demand" and limited availability.

Circuit City had been selling the I-Opener, made by Texas company
Netpliance, as a $99 loss leader, reducing the retail price from
$299.99, assuming t would receive a slice of subscription fees, from
customers who signed up with Netpliance as their ISP for $21.95 per
month.

However, a hack of the unit enables the user to choose a
different ISP. Even better, with minor modification, the I-Opener
can be turned into a fully-fledged, if rudimentary PC.

Initial suspicions that Intel's i820 chipset is a turkey have
been confirmed by Taiwanese newspaper The Commercial Times,
which reports that four big mobo companies have said sales have
failed to get off the ground.

At CeBIT 2000 last month, we reported that a number of Taiwanese
mobo manufacturers were unhappy with sales of main boards using the
i820 (Camino) chipset, despite attempts to fix problems which dogged
its introduction last year.

Compaq Computer Corp. is betting that slimming down its
commercial desktop PC line will increase profitability. As part of
CEO Michael Capellas' strategy for getting back on track, the
company will streamline its commercial desktop PC line, ZDNet News
has learned.

Capellas is known by some for his "fearless forecasts"
-- bold predictions about the future of the computer industry -- and
his think-out-of-the-box approach.

Thinking out of the box has turned to weeding out a few boxes.
The commercial line, called DeskPro, has grown to include dozens of
models with a wide range of processors and chip sets from Intel
Corp.

At the same time, Compaq's commercial PC sales have fallen. In
its fourth quarter, commercial PC sales totaled $3.1 billion, down
19 percent from the previous year. The unit also operated at a
loss.

Virtual AGP design is also one of the many features that have
emerged from Nvidia’s laboratories.

This is one of the basic proofs that this company wants to have
its fingers in all categories, from the lowest to the highest.

Virtual AGP is designed for older computer systems without any
AGP slot. Specially targeted machines are the many i810 mainboards
which do not provide any AGP slots. The i810 chipset just has
integrated VGA, with practically no 3D features, as well as many
PCI, slots which means that there's no AGP 3D gaming power
available.

IBM is taking a new look at the PC. IBM's Personal Systems Group
on Monday announced the NetVista product line, designed with the
Internet in mind.

The line includes a number of new PCs and digital devices. The
PCs offer new industrial designs, courtesy of the IBM team
responsible for ThinkPad notebooks, with matte-black finish and
flat-panel displays.

"These are new devices that are designed and optimized for
the user who is going to be on a network, such as the
Internet," said Ralph Martino, vice president of marketing for
the Personal Systems Group.

The PC manufacturing wing of Compaq is set to announce two fresh
models in its 75xx range in the next two weeks, The Register
has learned.

Both models are based on Pentium III Coppermine technology, and
our information is that market pressure, plus increased availability
of Intel processors, has allowed The Big Q to roll out the machines.

The CPQ 7598 uses a Pentium III running at 600 MHz, comes with
128 of memory, a 40GB hard drive, a 40-speed CD ROM, CD-RW, a 56K
modem and a Quickcam.

The other model in the range, the CPQ 7599 uses a Pentium III 700
MHz chip, but otherwise has an identical configuration to the 7598.

In a move which may avoid it having to pay swinging damages over
a law suit which cost Toshiba $1.2 billion last year, Compaq told
nearly two million users of a software patch which fixes a glitch in
a disk controller system.

The Wayne Reaud law firm filed class action cases against Compaq,
Packard Bell, HP and e-Machines on November 1st last year, after
settling with Toshiba, which apparently did not want to get involved
in legal wrangling.

Now, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal,
Compaq will tell 1.7 million users of Presario's that they can fix
the problem, which relates to a glitch in the disk controller and
which stops people downloading to floppy disks while multitasking.
It is offering a software patch for 26 Presario machines on its
support forum.

An unsurprisingly chuffed Sony this morning announced it sold
980,000 PlayStation 2s in Japan over the weekend - just 20,000 units
shy of its one million-machine target.

What's 20,000 units among friends? Quite a lot really, especially
when a good proportion of the total number of machines sold hasn't
actually shipped yet.

Sony was forced to admit that while it took 380,000 orders over
the Net, only 120,000 customers - less than one third of the total
-received their console. The reason: we're ten days behind schedule
on production, Sony confessed to Reuters, thanks to a shortage of
memory cards.

Trading in Palm's freshly-IPO'd shares added over 300 per cent to
the stock's launch price yesterday, taking them from $38 apiece to a
high of $165 before closing at $95.06.

The final price of the day left Palm, Inc. valued at $53.4
billion on paper, way above that of the company it emerged from,
3Com. Palm's former parent saw its shares fall over $22 to $83.81
after a period of strong growth in the run-up to the Palm IPO.

3Com has said that it plans to offer the bulk of its 93.8 per
cent stake in Palm to its shareholders within the next six months.
The drop suggests, perhaps, that buyers with a long-term view - and
in these day-trading times, six months is the long term -
have got their stakes in 3Com set up and ready for the windfall.
That said, given the way Palm's stock has rocketed in value, others
may now be persuaded to take the 3Com route to, so trading in 3Com
stock is likely to become more active.

Samsung this week demonstrated a cell phone equipped with a
built-in MP3 player which it plans to ship in the US later this
year.

Given current cell phone technologies' data transmission speeds
aren't sufficient to download an MP3 - at least not in any sensible
timeframe - so it's no surprise that the Samsung machine doesn't
support downloads through cellular networks.

Instead, users can hook the phone to a PC via both devices' USB
ports. The phone contains 64MB of memory, which should be sufficient
for up to two hours of music, though newswires reporting Samsung's
launch claimed the phone holds only 15 minutes' worth of music,
enough for two or three songs, and so of limited use.

The 0.18 micron based NV15 has only half the power dissipation of
Geforce 256 and the NV11 has approximately 30 per cent lower power
dissipation than the NV15, and so we can expect some mobile
computers based on the NV11.

Another fact that can give us a clue is the ACPI power management
with On, Standby, Suspend and Off modes supported by this card.

As Nvidia is already announcing cards using the NV11 and NV15 as
the "world's fastest GPU in Spring 2000" that gives us a
whopping clue about the availability of NV11 based products.

Info leaking out of newly IPO'd Palm suggests the company will
follow up its recently launched color Palm IIIc with a non-mono. At
this point we should point out that the source, as it were, for this
rumor is InfoWorld's pseudonymous columnist, Robert X.
Cringely - the real Robert Cringely has nothing to do with InfoWorld
and hasn't since 1995. That's not to imply the counterfeit
Cringely's moles are any less accurate than anyone else's in this
profession, simply that the bogus Bob generally likes to serve these
tidbits as appetizers rather than main course items.

Analysts and industry executives have lost sleep over the past
few months wondering when corporate customers would get back to
stores to buy new hardware. The slump followed a serious ramp-up in
sales as businesses spent tons of money buying new computers to
prepare for the so-called millennium bug.

At a Sony products show here, the consumer electronics giant
revealed who has the power these days: teenagers.

It seems the normally staid world of consumer electronics isn't
immune to the overwhelming buying power of so-called Generation Y,
as its latest electronics line shows. As demonstrated at this event,
Sony has incorporated more color and curves into its devices and
gadgets than ever before.

Teen culture is a powerful force in entertainment, as represented
in movies and popular music. Thus it's not surprising to see the
trends spilling over into the world of technology, where design has
become an important facet of computers and other technology devices.
Apple Computer's colorful iMac and Barbie-themed personal computers
are just some examples of recent attempts to spice up the familiar
PC "beige box."

Nevertheless, Sony is definitely jumping on the teen bandwagon,
Doherty said. The company has expanded its line of digital music
players, including one the size of a cigarette lighter. In addition,
the company showed its Music Clip, a pen-shaped MP3 player, along
with other digital music devices, including the Network Walkman,
which offers speedier music downloads than other Sony products.

Sony is to provide eight giants of the videogame industry,
including Capcom and Namco, with PlayStation 2 motherboards for
their own coin-operated arcade game systems.

Sony's motivation in the deal is clear: it wants to accelerate
the translation of coin-op games to home consoles (and vice versa),
and the easiest way to do that is to get the arcade software guys
working on the very system that forms the basis for console.

Traditionally, arcade games have provided the main inspiration
for console releases. It's only when Sony simplified the
PC/PlayStation porting process in order to increase the availability
of PlayStation titles, that the console business and the PC game
industry really got it together.

According to Santeler, who was remarkably frank about Compaq's
future roadmap in a lunchtime interview: "Positioning Itanium
is like positioning the new 454 engine from Chewy. The Itanium is a
new engine and we'll use this engine in a new car when it makes
sense."

He said Compaq will bring Itanium to market in a four way system
first, and targeted specifically at specialized markets.